Actually that's not all you can contribute. There's also documentation, with the FlightGear Manual... and this wiki of course! To contribute to the wiki, head off to the Wiki Portal. There's a lot to do there too.

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For aircraft, the system supports aircraft dirs, there is the package manager code which works but is currently unused, which can download and extract zipped aircraft. This needs a GUI but thanks to the new reset architecture we can finally build this GUI inside FG - i.e an ‘aircraft chooser’ UI - however I am find building such a UI rather outside my comfort zone. If anyone would like to help in this area, let me know.[1]

There are some pending merge requests[1] to add some YASim features, but we have an issue that since none of the current C++ developers own, or are experts in YASim, we're reluctant to be the person who merges such changes, and potentially introduces subtle regressions.

Obviously this is chicken-and-egg, since no one can become expert enough in the code to become a maintainer :)

So, I'm more than happy to apply patches *providing* I can be convinced they are sane+reasonable from a pure code perspective (happy to help with that, too,
if people are new to C++), and providing we have some assurance that a representative sample of YASim aircraft are unchanged or improved by the patch.
Suggestions for that means in practice, are most welcome!

Otherwise I worry, given the nature of the solver, we'll keep optimising the solver for some aircraft, and making other existing aircraft worse - until someone tests them, and announced that they're no longer working.[2]

— James Turner

I am still broadly happy to answer questions if posed (as long as I remember enough to come up with a meaningful answer). Just cc: me if you do, because my latencies here are measured in weeks.Bugs can always be fixed. What YASim needs is a maintainer, not really expertise per se. The latter comes from the former.[3]

Every month we try to include an interview with a contributor in the FlightGear Newsletter. Anyone contributing to FlightGear, in whatever way, is welcome to answer a few questions and write his/her own interview.